¹ Kripke, S., Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), p. 37.Google Scholar

² See, e.g., McDowell, J., Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 78–84.Google Scholar

³ For support for this point, see Fodor, J., ‘A Theory of Content, I’ in his A Theory of Content (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p. 79.Google Scholar

⁴ In this respect I am distancing myself from Kant, who held that there was a fundamental distinction between moral motivation and desire. It is unclear how Kant could accommodate the notion of what one should want.

⁵ Platts, M., Ways of Meaning (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 256–7.Google Scholar

⁶ Someone may suspect that this argument involves a fallacious application of Leibniz's Law within an intensional context. I think there is no fallacy: the realization of a desire must be thought by the desirer to be the object of the desire.

⁷ The idea of such rich perception is to be found in many places in McDowell's, work: e.g. ‘On “The Reality of the Past”’, in Action and Interpretation, ed. Hookway, C. and Pettit, P. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 140.Google Scholar

⁸ This definition is provisional because it does not yet secure the right degree of intensionality for belief contexts. There are several possible revisions, one of which is suggested in my The Good and the True (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), chapters 12–13.Google Scholar

⁹ Peacocke actually defines naturalism about explanation as the view that “any explanation of an event or temporal state of affairs is a causal explanation’: A Study of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 127.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Davidson, D., ‘Actions, Reasons, Causes’, in his Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).Google Scholar

¹¹ This notion of intrinsicness is here left unexplained. It needs to be explained as part of a fuller account of causation.

¹² Davidson's philosophical-logical argument for the claim that actions are events (which is questionable anyway) does not actually require more than that actions be entities of a much more general sort, over which one can quantify. See his ‘The Logical Form of Action Sentences’, in Essays on Actions and Events.

¹³ See Davidson, ‘Mental Events’, in Essays on Actions and Events.

¹⁴ See Davidson, ‘Causal Relations’, in Essays on Actions and Events.

¹⁵ See, e.g., Fodor, J., ‘Fodor's Guide to Mental Representation’, in his A Theory of Content, 19–24.Google Scholar

¹⁶ I here blithely ignore the debate about ‘simulation’ accounts of our ascription of propositional attitudes. (See Heal, J., ‘Replication and Functionalism’, in Language, Mind and Logic, ed. Butterfield, J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).Google Scholar) There are two reasons for not considering it here. First, it is unclear to me that the ‘simulation’ or ‘replication’ theory offers a radically different account of the nature of states of mind from that provided by an explicitly theoretical conception, rather than simply a different account of the way we usually think about them. (What is it that is simulated, after all?) Secondly, Heal herself accepts (see, e.g., Heal, J., ‘Simulation and Cognitive Penetrability’, Mind and Language 11 (1996), 48CrossRefGoogle Scholar) that a ‘simulation’ account of our thinking about other people's minds is not incompatible with our having a ‘prototheory’ of the mind; which is enough to bring the ‘simulation’ account within the scope of the characterization of typical naturalistic theories provided in the text.

¹⁷ A more direct argument against the causal account, on the ground that it is incompatible with freedom, is provided in my The Good and the True, chapter 8.

¹⁸ This conception is to be found in McDowell: see footnote 7 above.

¹⁹ We should therefore doubt the adequacy of counterfactual analyses of causation, if we accept that there are non-causal explanations. But this does not undermine the main purpose of counterfactual analyses, which is to distinguish between explanatory and non-explanatory relations in cases where causation is the only realistic candidate.

²⁰ Although this conception of the fundamental task for human beings (or any cognitive creature) is widespread, we should note how contentious it is: it seems already to presuppose naturalism.

²¹ For a classic statement of a view which distinguishes between ‘broad’ and ‘narrow’ content, see McGinn, C., The Structure of Content, in Thought and Object, ed. Woodfield, A. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982)Google Scholar. For the view that thoughts are essentially individuated by universal features, see Blackburn, S., Spreading the Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), chapter 9.Google Scholar

²² The resulting view of behaviour is very like that advocated by Strawson, G. in Mental Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), chapter 10Google Scholar, though Strawson's general account of mind is very different from mine.

²³ This is Strawson's view: see Mental Reality, p. 315 (but passim too).

²⁴ Strawson seems to be tempted by this: see ibid., p. 303.

²⁵ Hume, D., Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Selby-Bigge, L.; 3rd edition, ed. P. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 294.Google Scholar